About Us

The Chorleywood Residents Association (Hertfordshire, UK) is a non-party political association that is passionate about maintaining the special character of Chorleywood.

The work of the Association is championed by the Executive Committee, a dedicated enthusiastic body of volunteers, committed to representing the members of the Association and campaigning on their behalf.

The Executive Committee is supported in this work by the Area Representatives and others who undertake the essential tasks including delivering the twice yearly newsletter and collecting subscriptions.

We hope that this website will be a focal point for the residents of Chorleywood and through the contributions to us from everyone (whether members or not of the Association) we can become a valuable source of information for the local community.

Transport

Chorleywood has the benefit of being relatively well connected.

The M25, although it divides the parish in two, brings considerable accessibility to the village, and the long ongoing road widening works on the motorway due to end in mid-2010 will bring relief from the ongoing delays on the North Western section of the Orbital Motorway. Bus services are relatively infrequent, and we have our fair share of road defects.

Chorleywood is served by both the London Underground Metropolitan Line and Chiltern Railways services, with services typically every 10 minutes throughout most of the day. Although services are frequently disrupted at the weekends due to engineering works which will see new trains and faster services introduced in the long term.

And although we're only 20 minutes from Heathrow by road, we're just a few minutes by air, and Chorleywood is adjacent to the flight path where aircraft bank around to the NE to take an easterly departure from the UK, and we do have ongoing air traffic noise from overflying aircraft climbing out of Heathrow airport, as well as some light aircraft traffic to/from Denham airfield.

We continue to co-ordinate with the authorities responsible for transport in and around Chorleywood to ensure the interests of the Residents are represented. If you have any comments regarding transport issues, please get in touch at transport@chorleywoodresidents.co.uk

The County Council is calling a public meeting to discuss the Green Street flooding and a potential solution following a meeting betweenLocal Authority officers and the Green Street golf course owner.

The meeting is being held on Monday 2nd February commencing at 7:30pm in the Chorleywood War Memorial Hall. Please contact Sophie Williamson at the County Council for more details - her email address is: sophie.williamson@hertfordshire.gov.uk

Hertfordshire County Council currently subsidises a number of bus companies which do not have sufficientpassenger numbers to make them commercially viable. In total there are 119 subsided bus services in Hertfordshire and they have been the focus of a consultation that has been running since July and closes on the 8th October 2014.

Herts County Council has stated “In the current financial climate, we need to review how we subsidise some bus services. As far as possible, we want to meet the essential travel needs of our residents. At the same time, we need to make sure we’re providing the best value for money for all Hertfordshire’s taxpayers. No decisions have been made yet. We want as many people as possible – whether you’re a bus user or not – to respond to the consultation so we can carefully take your views into consideration before making any decisions. To protect the majority of services we support and the most used services, the County Council is proposing to withdraw funding to services that run after 6.30pm and withdraw funding for services that run on a Sunday. The vast majority of bus services in Hertfordshire are operated commercially by bus operators. Those services are unaffected by this proposal and consultation. Children entitled to free travel to and from school will continue to be provided with transport and we will continue to support concessionary fares for young and older people.”

You can visit www.hertsdirect.org/busconsult to find out more, give the County Council your views and see the Frequently Asked Questions about the consultation. If you don’t have internet access, you can visit your local library where free access is available or you can request a paper copy by calling 0300 123 4050. The Herts CC officer dealing with this is Sophie Williamson sophie.williamson@hertfordshire.gov.uk

The deadline for responses is the 8th October 2014. The findings of the consultation will be presented to the cross-party Highways and Waste Management Panel on 4 November 2014, before being considered by Cabinet on 10 November 2014.

The consultation document
on the Green Street flooding has now been published and we understand that discussions on proposed actions will be taking place on the 6th October 2014, with the following authorities and landowner including Herts CC and Bucks CC as Lead Local Flood Authorities, Herts CC Highways, Chiltern and Three Rivers District Councils and Quattro Ltd (Landowner).

Chenies Road

The recently installed
land drain has proved to be only partially effective in the prevention of flooding so an
upgraded land drain is due to be installed during the schools’ Autumn half term in October.

Emergency Roadworks Notification

Chorleywood Residents Association has discussed with
Chris Hayward, our County Councillor, the problems that emergency road works
cause when residents are not given prior warning. Ringway, the Herts County Council’s
roads’ contractor has advised that the situation regarding advance notification is
improving. However if there are any further instances of residents not being given prior warning of emergency road works Chris Hayward would like to be made aware of this. You can contact him at chris.hayward@hertfordshire.gov.uk

It was recently highlighted to us that the fare for paying by cash at Chorleywood Station Car Park had been increased to £4.10 daily charge. The fare for paying electronically by phone or online "hadn't increased" and was still £4.00

But the difficulty arises for cash payers because the car park ticket machines do not accept 5p and 10p pieces.

So you either end up paying £4.20 using a £2 + £2 + 20p and accept that you pay 10p extra.

Or you have to have a bunch of coins so you can pay £2 + £1 + 50p + 20p + 20p + 20p

For many travelers the incentive of a 10pm discount (or that fare staying the same) may incentivise those parking regularly to change their payment method. But for occasional car park users this is just an inconvenience and most people probably end up paying more than they need to.

We have raised this issue with TfL who have stated that they can appreciate the situation that has arisen due to the recent fare increase (which is determined by the London Mayor), but that the situation making it difficult to pay the correct fare in cash was not intentional and point out that the fare did not go up for non-cash payments. They do not expect that they can resolve the issue promptly, but we are continuing to pursue them for an answer.

We would encourage anyone who uses the Station Car Park to register a complaint with TfL using their online form

Contact Us -> Make a Complaint -> Tube -> Station Facilities (we can't bookmark this page, you need to navigate it for yourself)

A signed diversion route will be provided which will divert traffic via Heronsgate Road, Quickley Lane, and Rendlesham Way and vice versa.

A plan of this diversion route is shown in the notice from HCC available in the link above.

The work is weather dependent and from time to time unforeseen circumstances arise, any changes to the proposed start date, duration or working hours will be notified on the information boards at either end of the street, or the Herts Direct website. Questions or concerns regarding these specific works can be answered by email: herts.direct@hertfordshire.gov.uk or by telephone 0300 123 4047.

We've lost count of the number of vehicles that have been written off by being driven into the flood, despite the road being signposted as being closed by Herts Highways. If the road is signposted as closed it's highly unlikely an insurer will pay out for damage to a vehicle.

THE PROBLEM

The dip on Green Street closest to the junction of Orchard Drive is flooding so badly now that the road (the widest access to Chorleywood village centre) is impassable to both vehicles and pedestrians on a regular basis and the 336 bus from High Wycombe to Watford is frequently re-routed. The flooding is not only inconvenient but is also a potential safety hazard.

For more detail and background on this issue please read on below.

Call for Action:

We would like to help those of you who wish to raise the profile of this issue in an attempt to get a permanent resolution for the community.

Chorleywood Residents’ Association along with Chorleywood Magazine and Chorleywood Mums would like to encourage as many residents as possible to take one (or more) of the following actions:

Use the comments section on the Chorleywood Magazine website to voice your opinion on this issue and the work we are doing to try to tackle this issue

Can you help with any of the history of what has been happening on Green Street and the adjacent land?
HCC seem to think that “There is understood to be a long history of flooding at the [Green Street] site although only relatively recent events have been recorded.” - can you help clarify on this point?
Can you help with this? Let us know!

The County Councillor for most of us in Chorleywood in Christopher Hayward, and he has been in receipt of quite a lot of correspondence about this issue. However he would encourage further correspondence, especially direct with County Hall, as it will improve the profile of the issue at County Hall.
Include your County Councillor in correspondence Chris.Hayward@hertfordshire.gov.uk where you can

Include the CRA email address in correspondence greenstreet@chorleywoodresidents.co.uk and use this email address to share with us any acknowledgement or responses you get from logging complaints, etc.

Background information:

Green Street is managed by Herts Highways, part of Hertfordshire County Council (HCC).

As a Highway authority, Hertfordshire has a responsibility to reasonably maintain the highway free from flooding.

Extract from the Hertfordshire website:

HCC, as the Highways Authority for Hertfordshire, has a common law duty to maintain the highway and “put the highway in such good repair as renders it reasonably passable for the ordinary traffic of the neighbourhood at all seasons of the year without danger caused by physical condition.” The duty to maintain includes a duty to keep the highway free from flooding and provide adequate drainage.

The issue on Green Street is slightly complicated:

The public highway is firmly on Hertfordshire land:

Although it used to be Bucks before the boundary change in 1991

The County boundary runs along the western boundary of the road

It is suspected that the surface water is accumulating on land to the western side of the road (i.e. Bucks) and is draining to the east

The earthworks which have been permitted for the Golf Course which may be implicated in this issue lies on Bucks land were given planning permission by Chiltern District Council (the District Council on the Bucks side)

And the 336 bus which runs from High Wycombe to Watford is a service that is contracted to Transport for Bucks.
Hertfordshire Intalink (the part of HCC that looks after buses) appears to be largely ignorant about this issue.

Road Closure History

As far as we are aware, the number of days that Green Street has been impassable due to flooding over the past three years is as follows:

(as of 16th February 2014)

2014 - 30 days (so far)

2013 - 15 days

2012 - 26 days

03 Jan to 11 Jan (9 days)

27 Jan to 04 Feb (9 days)

12 Jun to 14 Jun (3 days)

26 Jan to 16 Feb (21 days)

14 Feb to 18 Feb (4 days)

23 Nov to 30 Nov (8 days)

20 Dec to 03 Jan (14 days)

Flood Water report

Cllr Chris Hayward has shared with us an Outline of Investigation (PDF) into the flooding on Green Street where as Lead Local Flood Authority, another section of Hertfordshire County Council has to conduct an investigation into the issue on Green Street under Section 19 of the Flood Water Management Act 2010.

The disappointing news is that it is projected that it will take between 14 and 16 weeks for this report to be produced. During which time Chorleywood will continue to suffer if there is sustained rainfall and Green Street continues to be closed. And the only timescales that are mentioned are for the production of the report, with no mention on remedial actions to be taken.

No action taken to drain the Highway

During the recent bad weather in January and February 2014 we have seen other areas where flooding has occurred in the locality. Whilst we are fortunate in Chorleywood to not have been badly affected by flooding on this occasion, there seems to have been differing response levels to similar issues elsewhere in the County.

Where life and limb are at risk the emergency services, and primarily the Fire and Rescue service have responsibilities to protect life, and will assist from time to time with pumping out of areas where the flooding risks life or property.

However the Fire and Rescue service have no responsibility to remove water from the highway where there is no additional risk to life or occasionally property, this is solely the responsibility of Herts Highways and their drainage provision.

Green Street has been flooded and impassable to vehicular and pedestrian traffic for 9 weeks out of the last 26 months, and the excessive time the road has been closed is in part because Hertfordshire Highways have taken no proactive action to pump or drain away the excess water from the Highway. They could have deployed pumps to try to remove the water more quickly, but why have they not done so? Are they failing in their duty to maintain reasonable free passage along highway by not doing so?

Update: On Friday 14th February contractors from Ringway were spotted creating new trench gullies (natural drainage) to the north west side of the flooding site. Although this might improve drainage, we are in no doubt that whislt this might alleviate the issue, it is not addressing the root cause of the issue of where the water is coming from. Our County Councillor Chris Hayward is in agreement on this point, and will continue to press for action even when the water subsides and the road reopens.

Trenching gullies to the NW of the flood site as of Sunday 16th Feb:

Where is the water coming from?

It is suspected, but not proven, that the earthworks on the golf course that has been under construction for many years to the west of Green Street, just above the flood side and opposite Stubbs Farm may be implicated in changes in rainwater and surface drainage which has in turn caused this issue. It is, after all, the only significant change in the topography of the area.

Comments from a resident have concluded that the local high spot is 126m just south of the A404 close to the Garden Centre, and the local low spot is 106m adjacent to Green Street at the big dip and just west of the road. It has been suggested that the bridleway that runs behind the Golf Course site (from the A404/Chenies down to Barrel Arch) is considerably drier than it used to be, and it might therefore be concluded that surface water that used to drain to the west down onto the bridleway may now be draining towards Green Street. But is this actually the case, and can others offer comments on the history of this area and its drainage?

Bus - no one is bovvered?

During periods of previous flooding, the Residents’ Association has taken Herts Intalink to task over the complete disregard for their duties to try to keep passengers informed of disruption to the 336 bus service in Chorleywood. It would appear that Herts Highways don’t see it as important to inform Intalink of the fact that they have closed a bus route, and even when Intalink became aware they neglected to include the details of the 336 bus being on diversion on their own Service Disruption webpage, nor be able to inform callers of this fact when calling their helpline. If Transport for Bucks and/or Carousel Buses are informing Hertfordshire Intalink, no action is being taken.

Experience from the most recent flooding hasn’t improved.

Martin Trevett, one of our district councillors has tried again to negotiate with the bus company to see if they could consider an alternative route through Chorleywood to maintain a service to the bus stops on Station Approach. But this is the kind of thing the Transport Authorities (Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire) should be doing.

Footnotes:

For the sake of clarity:

Highways are a County Council, not a District Council (Three Rivers) responsibility

In Hertfordshire, all public highways are maintained by Herts Highways, a department of Environmental Services within the county council

The Environment Agency often linked with flooding in the media has no responsibility for this issue as the water doesn’t come from a river or reservoir

The Highways Agency is also not involved - they only look after motorways and national trunk roads

A further note is that the dip in Green Street that is just south of Stubbs Farm has had a tendency to flood from time to time but its not usually deep enough to prevent traffic passing and the pavement is elevated hence allowing pedestrians to still pass, although they might get wet from spray off passing vehicles... Last year Herts Highways managed to improve the drainage at this point in the road after requests from Chorleywood Residents’ Association and the issues do not appear to continue to be such a significant a problem at this point in the road although there is still room for improvement.

The ongoing difficulties posed for uses of the 336 bus service that passes through Chorleywood continue with the flooding on Green Street which is preventing the bus from getting into the Village.

The 336 bus which runs from High Wycombe to Watford is a bit of an oddity. It's operated by Carousel Buses based in High Wycombe (owned by the GoAhead Group), but it's a service contracted to Buckinghamshire County Council, although a good proportion of the route actually runs in Hertfordshire. Because of the fact that it's a Buckinghamshire service it appears that difficulties that prevent the service from running are often off the radar of Hertfordshire County Council, although this shouldn't be the case.

As a Residents' Association we are well aware of the impact of the loss of the bus service causes local residents. It's impacts can be considerable to young and elderly residents who have less options to use their own transport to get around. Whilst bus and transport is really a County issue, Martin Trevett, one of our local district Councillors has tried once again to engage with the bus company. He has copied us into correspondence to see if they can consider getting the bus to coming in and out of the village via Common Road when Green Street is closed due to flooding.

At the time of writing this on Saturday 8th February 2014, many of the local bus services are disrupted due to the closure of Park Street / Scots Hill in Rickmansworth due to flooding. Bucks Buses have alerted people that the 336 service has been curtailed and is only running High Wycombe to Amersham, whereas Herts Intalink think it's been diverted. Another example of the two authorities not talking to each other. What information is actually accurate?

We have also learnt from Les Mead, one of the district Councillors in Rickmansworth that Hertfordshire County Council may be planning cuts to local bus services. No details are available at this time but indications suggest a cut of £200,000 next year and £700,000 the following year. We have very few local bus services as it is in our corner of South West Herts, and in Chorleywood only two bus routes of which one is run by Buckinghamshire! No further details are available at present but if you have any concerns with this news please contact your County Councillor, which for most of us in Chorleywood is Chris Haywood.

We've been given a little detail of the upcoming new Metropolitan Line timetable that starts on Sunday 8th December. We wrote previously that we were expecting some additional fast services either side of both the morning and evening peak periods to alleviate the loss of fast trains during off-peak times.

Morning Peak.

From Chorleywood, the first fast service in to central London will be at 06.08 (current first fast service is at 06.42), with the last ‘fast’ service departing at 09.22 (the current departs at 09.06).

Evening Peak.

Returning from central London in the evening peak, the first ‘fast’ train from Baker Street to Chorleywood will depart at 16.11 (compared to 17.11 at present). The last ‘fast’ service will depart Baker Street at 20.09 (currently it is at 20.05). However the new later ‘semi-fast’ departure at 20.14 from Baker Street referred to above completes the journey to Chorleywood in 40 minutes – which is only two minutes longer than the current last ‘fast’ departure from Baker Street at 20.05.

The view of the Residents Association is that whilst these specific improvements are welcome, they do not go far enough, and we will continue to press for the reintroduction of more fast services in off-peak periods.

We've been on the case with Transport for London with regard to the lack of lighting in the station car park over the past couple of weeks.

There was an issue with the car park lighting back in Spring, and although it took TfL several weeks to resolve the fault they provided hired-in temporary lighting running off of diesel generators for the duration of the fault.

However on this occasion they seem either unwilling or unable to provide hired-in generator lighting, and after a whole week of darkness and after some pressure exerted from ourselves have installed some temporary lighting on top of the car park attendants hut as a stopgap solution. It's not ideal as it doesn't effectively light the whole car park, but it's better than nothing.

A hit squad of engineers were due to attend on Friday 1st November to progress the resolution of the fault, but this has been put back to Monday 4th November as some key resource was unavailable. We will continue to monitor the situation and chase TfL to provide a solution.

We have been given advance notification of the overnight closure of A412, Park Road in Rickmansworth on Thursday 19th September.

Carriageway Resurfacing and patching works are due to commence on

A412 Park Road, Rickmansworth, between

the Roundabout with A412 Watford Road / The Green / top of Scotts Hill, and

the Roundabout with A412 Rectory Road / A404 Chorleywood Rd junction

on Thursday the 19th September 2013, from 8pm to 5am

are programmed to take approximately 1 night to complete, weather permitting.

Herts Highways will be replacing sections of the existing worn out road, replacing damaged iron covers and re-applying the road markings.

In order to create a safe working environment for the workforce and members of the public alike, the works will be completed using a full road closure.

These works will be undertaken using a road closure undertaken overnight between 08:00pm and 5:00am, Monday to Friday only. However, if we encounter unforeseen circumstances on site, it is possible we may work outside these hours. We will aim to complete the noisiest operations such as removing the old road and jack hammering by midnight to reduce the disturbance to nearby residential properties. Other works will still continue after this.

For a map of the extent of road closure (shown in red) and the diversionary route (shown in blue) click here.

Vehicular access to properties during the working hours will be maintained and controlled by gatemen at each end of the closure but there may be delays. It is also possible that traffic may be advised to use alternative access routes if the gatemen deem it unsafe to enter the construction area. Pedestrian access will not be affected.

Some degree of disruption and delay can be expected as a result of the works and whilst we will make every effort to minimise these please allow extra time for any journeys you may make while the works are in progress. We greatly appreciate your patience and co-operation.

Herts County Council or their Contractors will not approach you offering to carry out works to your property. Any cold calling of this nature by people claiming to represent Herts County Council should be viewed with suspicion, and caution. They will not have Herts County Council authority or approval.

The work is weather dependent and from time to time unforeseen circumstances arise, any changes to the proposed start date, duration or working hours will be notified on the information boards at either end of your street and will be available at http://www.hertsdirect.org/roadworks or by calling 0300 123 40 47 and by quoting Herts Highways Permit No:BR0201000028040.